Lunar launches app for kids and says it can capture 250,000 customers

Nordic challenger bank Lunar is launching a paid offshoot app for children and teenagers and says it can capture hundreds of thousands of customers. The Danish challenger bank, which is ten years old, is launching Lunar Youth, designed for children and teens aged between seven and 17. In the UK, challenger Monzo is also launching a child-friendly app.

Lunar Youth features include an option for children and teens to design their own card and app theme; digital tools, such as an overview of spending, real-time insights, spend categorisation and budgeting tools. The app is linked to a parent's bank account, and parents can set budget limits, monitor transactions, and access spending insights.

It also includes category restrictions in areas such as crypto, gambling, and adult content while all online purchases require parental approval.

Ken Villum Klausen, founder and CEO of Lunar, which has over 950,000 customers, said:

"We’re building a digital bank for a digital generation—giving kids the tools to explore, learn, and build confidentially managing money, step by step, in a safe environment. We’ve been around for nearly a decade, and the customers who joined us in the early days have grown up with us—many of them now becoming parents themselves.

"Lunar Youth isn’t just about kids; it’s about continuing to be the go-to bank for our users as they move through different life stages—whether they’re opening their first account as teenagers or helping their own children take their first financial steps."

Lunar Youth is offered to users on some of Lunar’s paid tiers, priced at around four euros a month. Lunar Youth has been tested internally ahead of its launch.

Klausen said two of his children had been using it and had “built some great money habits”, such as learning where money comes from and that it’s not an infinite resource. On the product’s ambitions, he pointed out that the Nordics was an “insular landscape” and that there are 2.5m children and teenagers in the region.

He added:

“It is the most profitable banking landscape on the planet with less competition. We don’t have any other European challengers in the Nordic infrastructure. So I think every time we launch a vertical new have an ambition over the years to be capturing around 10 per cent of the opportunity in our regions.”

Last year Lunar launched a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) business as a separate entity.